CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

An organization I work with would like to allow only a single membership type (in my case level) per contact.   Memberships in my case are only for a single organization, and memberships are structured in "giving levels" with the only difference between levels being the $ given - there is no status or privilege associated with different membership levels.   In the past, if someone joined as a "general" member and then later joined as a "senior" member, they would have two memberships, each with a different level.    

The way around this is to have a staff administrator manually expire (status override) the previous membership, but this is unreliable as the staff is overworked and often confused.  

Why does this matter?  Because members get auto-renewal emails for expiring memberships that are inappropriate.  They have already renewed their membership - but at a different level.

I've tried to explain that having a good record keeping of multiple level memberships is important, but there is no traction with that argument.

I'd like to see what you guys think about one of 2 solutions:

1. an option in CiviMember to "force" single memberships.  If a new membership level is signed up, rather than create a new membership entirely, it extends the old membership and for lack of a better term "converts" the old membership level into the new level.

2. A "duplicate" memberships search, which returns contacts that have 2 or more memberships.  This search would also be filterable by "current" or "expired" memberships.  This would allow the staff to more reliably locate and deal with duplicate memberships appropriately.  I have written a query of my own that does this, but it is not a "search" per se, just a raw query.

Which approach would the core team prefer?  Would either approach be inappropriate?  

Has there been any progress on this? With my new CiviCRM setup, and members renewing in different categories, I am running into this issue of multiple simultaneous memberships and inappropriate renewal reminders going out. Help please!